On Tuesday 8 September 2026 Google’s Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, announced two features aimed at multi-location retailers, restaurants and local service businesses. The first, Local customer optimization, is a toggle in Performance Max campaigns for store goals and is rolling out now. The second, Store Sales in Data Manager, lets an advertiser link a CRM or a Google Sheet inside Google Data Manager so that in-store transactions flow into the account without a manual upload; Google says it arrives “in the coming weeks”. For anyone who has tried to connect Google Ads store sales to a till, the second one is the part to watch.
“Ahead of the holiday rush, we’re introducing two features for multi-location retailers, restaurants and local services to drive and measure in-store sales with ease,” Marvin wrote on X, in the post reported by Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. She described the pair as uniting “real-time navigation signals on the front end with seamless offline revenue measurement on the back end”.
Why Google is linking ads to the till now
Neither feature is entirely new. Local customer optimization first surfaced as a Google Ads help document on 12 August 2026, and Search Engine Land noted at the time that it belongs to Google’s move of local advertising into Performance Max. What changed on 8 September is that the setting is live in accounts rather than described in documentation.
Store sales measurement is older still. Google has offered store sales direct upload for years, but its help page reads like an enterprise contract: allowlisting, a supported country and vertical, a minimum of 30,000 transactions in the last 90 days, regular uploads of more than 10,000 new transactions a month. Data Manager, launched in beta in 2023 as Google’s hub for first-party data, has been absorbing the connections that make such uploads possible: Google Sheets and HTTPS sources in June 2024, then Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Oracle and Shopify in June 2025, according to its announcements page. The September announcement joins the two products, so the transaction data lives where the connectors already are.
The timing follows a familiar pattern. On 1 September Google began auto-upgrading Search campaigns to AI Max, and offline revenue is the signal that automated bidding most often lacks.
What Local customer optimization does and does not do
Google’s help document is precise about the conditions. The campaign objective must be “Local store visits and promotions”, the campaign type Performance Max, and the conversion goals offline only: store visits, store sales, contacts hosted by Google, or directions hosted by Google. Locations come from a linked Business Profile account or from location and affiliate location assets. With the toggle on, Google Ads prioritises budget towards people who are “actively navigating, trip-planning, or searching for locations on Google Maps, Waze or Google Search”, or in Marvin’s words, “right when they’re actively in-market nearby”.
Two incompatibilities matter for planning. The toggle cannot be combined with online conversion goals, and it cannot be used in a Performance Max campaign that carries products from Merchant Center. Search Engine Land’s reading is that a retailer running a single Performance Max campaign for both online sales and footfall has to split it: one campaign for the shop, a separate one for the website.
What Google Ads store sales in Data Manager changes
Today, sharing in-store transactions with Google Ads means formatting a file to Google’s schema, hashing customer identifiers, and uploading it on a schedule. Marvin’s framing of the new feature is “reducing the technical load to share your in-store sales data to your Google Ads account”: the advertiser links a CRM or a Google Sheet in Data Manager, and the account can then measure in-store sales and, in her words, optimise “toward your highest potential walk-in customers”.
What Google has not said is as important as what it has. There is no rollout date beyond “the coming weeks”. Search Engine Journal reports that customer information such as emails, phone numbers and addresses must be hashed before upload, that daily or weekly uploads are recommended, and that access is limited to eligible, allowlisted advertisers. Whether the Data Manager route inherits the 30,000-transaction threshold of direct upload, or relaxes it, has not been stated. Until Google’s help centre documents the Data Manager version, we would assume the existing eligibility rules apply.
What it means for your business
Check eligibility before you plan around it. The thresholds on Google’s store sales page exclude most single-location businesses, and Marvin’s own audience list, multi-location retailers, restaurants and local services, says who this is for. If you are a chain of pharmacies, gyms or restaurants with tens of thousands of transactions a quarter, put this on the Q4 list. If you are one shop, the equivalent capability already exists without an allowlist: offline conversion import and enhanced conversions for leads, which record a sale from the CRM against the click that produced it. That plumbing is what our CRM and analytics projects build first, because every later optimisation depends on it.
The constraint is the CRM, not Google Ads. Whichever route applies, the account can only learn from transactions that carry an identifier it can match: a consistently formatted email or phone number, a timestamp, a value, and a store. A till that records anonymous sales, or a CRM where staff type the customer’s name and nothing else, gives Data Manager nothing to link. We described in why cost per lead rises month after month how bidding drifts when it optimises towards the wrong event; feeding it real sale values is the fix, and it starts with data hygiene at the point of sale.
In Europe, the first upload is a privacy decision. Hashing does not remove the need for a legal basis, a privacy notice that covers sharing customer data with an advertising platform, and compliance with Google’s customer data policies, which the help page lists as a condition of eligibility. Settle that with whoever handles your data protection before the connector is switched on, not after the first report arrives.
Local customer optimization is worth a separate campaign. For a restaurant group or a retail chain, a store-goals Performance Max campaign with the toggle on is a clean way to buy the moment when someone nearby is choosing where to go. It needs a complete Business Profile for every location, offline goals only, and no Merchant Center feed, which is why the split from the online campaign is not optional. Our paid advertising campaigns for multi-location clients usually already run footfall and online sales separately; this setting gives the footfall campaign a reason of its own to exist.
Do not count on it for this year’s peak. “Ahead of the holiday rush” is the ambition; “coming weeks” plus allowlisting is the reality. Our view is that the durable work is the same either way: a CRM that records who bought what and when, a Business Profile that is right for every location, and campaigns structured so that footfall and online revenue can be measured apart. Whether the Data Manager connector reaches your account in September or in January, that groundwork is what it will plug into.
